Altered Paint Cans Finished!

I was planning to fill them up completely with cookies, but after I realized it would take approximately 100+ cookies per can to do so, I decided that I like my sanity too much, so I sent Jeff to the store to buy candy, and to use those as fillers along with tissue paper.  I did however make 188 cookies before I started going nutty.

Anyway, here are the final products.

These are for family of course.  You can see in the second picture that I've done the cans in different designs for the top; the only real thing that's the same are the gingerbread people and snowflakes that decorate the sides.  I used tags from the Christmas tag swap; they came in handy for these!  The train can is for my SIL Melissa & her husband Devin and their son Aidan; I picked a train beacuse Aidan has a fascination with wheels, and they did their tree in Blue and Silver, so that's why I picked those colors.  The pink and silver one is for my BIL, his wife Jessica and her Cirrena & Barret; I picked the colors beacuse I know she LOVES pink, and she'll totally love it.  The top that says "Merry Christmas" is actually for Devin's parents Betty and Gary; my parents aren't here and I consider them honorary grandparents for the girls.  The can with the wavy circle is for my BIL Andy and his wife Camie, and their four kids McKenzie, Kade, Ella & Parker.  I didn't chose the colors or designs for them in particular, I was just running out of ideas and liked how the paper went with the ribbon.  The last one of course is for my inlaws John and Wendy, and my SIL Shayla and my BIL Tim who still live at home.  Again, No particular reason why I chose the paper and ribbon; however because the ribbon was candy cane stripped, I figured why not do a candy design for the top to match?

This project was done using Joys of the Season cart for the tops and the snowflakes which were cut out with vellum, and the gingerbread people were cut out from my Paper Doll Dress Up cartridge.

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas!  This was my first Christmas being crafty for the gifts, and while the cookies were a hassle along with trying to figure out how to stick the vellum snowflakes to the acrylic, I had alot of fun.  But next year, I'm going to do something that's a bit easier.

Altered Paint Can

Well, for Christmas this year, I'm doing altered paint cans filled with cookies.  I'm making five of them and after some trial and error, I've got the snowflakes to stick to the cans!  I cut out gingerbread men and women using my Paper Doll Dress Up cartridge, the snowflakes and can toppers are made with my Joys of the Season Cartridge, and I used my Martha Stewart Icicle Punch for the icicles and then I used ribbon I bought for the top part of the cans.  I'm not going to show ALL of the cans until after Christmas, but here's my first one that I'm satisfied with.

 

I love how it came out.  The ribbon says "merry christmas" on it, and I figured, what better cut out to do than "Merry Christmas" for the top?  The white card stock is some I just had laying around from a scrapbook that I bought, and the paper is from the DCWV Christmas Stack from Joann's.  I used design studio to cut the Merry Christmas out, and I made my first resizable cut file thanks to Diane's instructions on her blog!  I used a combination of the "ornament" cut feature and a plain regular circle.  Thanks to the latest design studio update, I was able to deselect the ornament cut and the little circle for the ornament.  It's a GREAT feature, I absolutely love it!  Oh, and in case you were wondering, the ribbon was made by American Crafts.

I couldn't have done this without Diane's wonderful instructions.. check out the rest of her blog, she's got fantastic stuff up, she's so creative and talented!

I Made a Hooter Hider!

Okay, I'm a huge personal advocate of breastfeeding.  I breastfed Zoe her first year of life; formula never crossed her palate.  I of course gave her other things too like juice starting when she was six months old and then I transitioned her to whole milk when she was a few weeks shy of one just to start transitioning over.  And of course, I'm currently breastfeeding Ruthie as well.  Ruthie however has recieved some formula, but it was just from samples that I recieved at the hospital and then I bought some because of the frequency and duration that we've have their Grandma Wendy watch them.

Anyway, Ngaire -remember the invitations and diaper cake?- had her beautiful little girl on Halloween!  And currently, Ngaire is breastfeeding Azrael, but like any new mom, breastfeeding is kind of an adjustment for her.  There's the 'what's going on with my boob' issue where she's not quite sure if the baby is latched and it's much easier for her to nurse if she's able to see what Azrael is doing.. and I guess hiding under a blanket in the dark isn't helping much in terms of visibility.  I remembered that she registered for a hooter hider, but unfortunately did not receive one.  I had some fabric that I was given by a friend and I offered to make one for Ngaire out of the fabric.  It was kind of a stretchy, thicker fabric that's probably for decorating or something.  Anyway, I looked up online how to make them and found a decent tutorial here, and then sent our husbands to Joann's for some D rings and boning and after 45 minutes, a few male-oriented jokes, and a failed seam, I finished it!  Here's what it looked like.  I didn't have Ngaire model it since she would have thought I was strange, but I did get two pictures of it hanging off of a door knob.

 

Anyway, there you have it!  I felt I could have been a bit neater with the seams, but it was my first one, and Ngaire didn't seem to care, she just wanted something to make breastfeeding easier.